A few years ago, I made a thread asking if free/open source will ever catch up to its commercial counterpart. The consensus was that FOSS is already at part with proprietary software in many areas. I definitely agree.

For example: many people say Firefox is superior to IE. OpenOffice.Org is considered a good replacement for MS Office. R is the de facto standard for statistical packages. Blender is right up there with Maya and Bryce, not to mention that it has a very small installation footprint. And Scilab is considered to be just as powerful Matlab, if you don't consider its minor shortcomings.

However, what made these software so successful is that they were developed by large companies. In contrast, there seems to be a large gap between FOSS developed by smaller groups and similar commercial products. For instance, Photoshop is the considered the industry leader in graphics software. It goes without saying that GIMP is the open source Photoshop alternative, but it seems to be far behind CS5. The fact that GIMP 2.8 keeps getting delayed doesn't help the issue. The same can be said for antivirus programs. This page lists a bunch of them, but only a couple are free/open source. ClamAV seems to be the most popular free program; however, it has a relatively low detection rate and lacks a GUI. Elcomsoft's Advanced Archive Password Recovery is the best known ZIP password recovery package, while the best FOSS equivalent I know of (FCrackZip) seems pretty primitive in comparison. And don't get me started on the lack of free games. While there are game companies that have generously release the source code to some of there games, such as id Software and our very own 3D Realms, they can be counted on two hands.

So my questions are:

1. Are antivirus programs, graphics software and games hard to develop in general? (I don't know that much about software development, so I don't really have the answer to this one.)
2. Are people less willing to contribute to free software projects? (I'd say "yes" because folks are motivated by money.)
3. Will free software ever catch up to commercial software in all aspects? (I think the answer is also yes; however, it will be a very long time. I'd imagine that an automated software development system would be a great benefit to the free software community once we advance to that level in AI research.)

1. Are antivirus programs, graphics software and games hard to develop in general? (I don't know that much about software development, so I don't really have the answer to this one.)

The Gimp's problem is that it's not naturally intuitive to most people. I don't think that's ever going to be fixed.

Anti-virus programs are pointless on non-Windows operating systems. Open source development is still focused around Unix.

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Originally Posted by ixfd64

2. Are people less willing to contribute to free software projects? (I'd say "yes" because folks are motivated by money.)

The most important open source projects have corporate sponsorship. Very few people contribute anything for free.

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Originally Posted by ixfd64

3. Will free software ever catch up to commercial software in all aspects? (I think the answer is also yes; however, it will be a very long time. I'd imagine that an automated software development system would be a great benefit to the free software community once we advance to that level in AI research.)

Automated software development is a fallacious quest. Programming is already just listing tasks. Simpler methodologies just turn out to be limiting or ultimately more difficult.

Well, we also know that Blender has become easier to use, and it's pretty darn close to their Autodesk counterparts (Maya, 3ds Max), so I see this becoming more popular as the years go by. I really can't get over just how impressed I was with the interface improvements in 2.5 over previous versions. It's gotten the attention of those in the professional 3D modeling industry, and equal respect all around. Hence, I'm proud to be wearing their logo in my avatar as a result of how far Ton Roosendaal and company have come.

I mean, let's face it, it would cost anywhere from $500 - $10,000 for a good 3D modeling package ($500 being for Carrara 8 Pro, $10K being for Houdini Escape, and your Autodesk licenses being around $4K with the license and subscription). So let's face it, Blender is certainly become a popular option because of this. The only time I ever used Maya was when Alias had it as a PLE, and since Autodesk swallowed up Alias, and kissed the personal edition of Maya good bye, that's when Blender took over as the next big package for the hobbyist, and being open source allowed contributors to bring Blender to around the same level of features and ease of use as Maya (hell, you have a Maya preset in 2.5 for crying out loud!).

Despite people making fun of Apple for claiming that there aren't any Mac viruses, there aren't really any Mac viruses. The major ones are trojans which require you to install (!) them manually, providing your sudo credentials. OSX has ~10% share, but not 10% of viruses. It's an infinitesimally small fraction of a percent, and we have to include trojans.

There are so many different variants of Linux that there's little to no chance of success attacking desktop users. Most exploits targeting Linux boxes are looking for flaws in poorly written PHP software, and the like. They're bots, and they're out of the purview of an anti-virus program.

Even on Windows, most viruses are just trojans. You've got them from running pirated software and key generators.

ClamAV's goal is to detect Windows viruses that might be stored on a Samba share or email inbox. There's little reason for a Linux/Unix user to use it for their own benefit.

Despite people making fun of Apple for claiming that there aren't any Mac viruses, there aren't really any Mac viruses. The major ones are trojans which require you to install (!) them manually, providing your sudo credentials. OSX has ~10% share, but not 10% of viruses. It's an infinitesimally small fraction of a percent, and we have to include trojans.

There are so many different variants of Linux that there's little to no chance of success attacking desktop users. Most exploits targeting Linux boxes are looking for flaws in poorly written PHP software, and the like. They're bots, and they're out of the purview of an anti-virus program.

Even on Windows, most viruses are just trojans. You've got them from running pirated software and key generators.

ClamAV's goal is to detect Windows viruses that might be stored on a Samba share or email inbox. There's little reason for a Linux/Unix user to use it for their own benefit.

Then it's not a virus, in the traditional sense. The idea of viruses is that they should self-execute and self-replicate (like a biological virus, hence the name). What you're referring to is a trojan. Trojans are not an operating system exploit, because the act of installing them gives them full system privileges anyway, so any monkey can write a trojan for any system without a lot of effort.

The market share argument isn't convincing, because it says that basically no-one will care about targeting your platform until you have a critical number of users - which needs more thorough explanation. It's not close to being axiomatic.

Then it's not a virus, in the traditional sense. The idea of viruses is that they should self-execute and self-replicate (like a biological virus, hence the name). What you're referring to is a trojan. Trojans are not an operating system exploit, because the act of installing them gives them full system privileges anyway, so any monkey can write a trojan for any system without a lot of effort.

Let's just talk about malware in general then. It still needs administrative rights to install itself on the OS. Whether user installed it or it gained entrance through exploit and/or weak password.

And I think that if antivirus programs are pointless in Mac environment then they are pointless in Win also. Because most of the malware won't have a chance if you are install security updates and don't use administrative account as a default one while working.

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The market share argument isn't convincing, because it says that basically no-one will care about targeting your platform until you have a critical number of users - which needs more thorough explanation. It's not close to being axiomatic.

Because there is no point in having botnet on Mac if you can have it on Windows.